International Rankings

International university rankings have become a useful tool for students making their university choices. There are three authoritative rankings available: THES rankings, QS rankings and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings.

Dutch Universities in International Rankings

The Netherlands has thirteen public universities – seven fully comprehensive universities, three technical universities and two that have developed from having been economics universities and one agricultural university. There is also a small private business university. As a whole, the Netherlands does well in the university rankings. In the QS Rankings it comes third in countries (joint with Germany) with 11 universities in the top-200, behind the USA and UK. It comes third in the THES. “In terms of overall number of institutions in the top 200, the US leads the way with 75, followed by the UK (32), Germany (12), the Netherlands (12) and Canada (9).

	Leiden University				Humanities Faculty
	World	Europe	Continental Europe	Non-native English	World	Europe	Continental Europe	Non-native English
THES	79	22	11	19	35	10	4	4
QS	88	30	13	21	37	14	4	9
Shanghai	65	14	11	14	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
n/a=non-applicable, no separate humanities analysis

Times Higher Educational Supplement (THES) Rankings

The best, in the sense of being the most transparent and employing the most diffuse range of data, is undoubtedly THES Rankings. The final weighting and Leiden’s rank in each is shown below:

*Element in Weighting*	*Contribution to Index*	*Leiden’s Rank*
Teaching	30%	98
International Outlook	5%	114
External Funds	2,5%	77
Research	30%	72
Citations	32,5%	122
TOTAL	100%	79

The THES analysis placed Leiden 79 in the World rankings and 22 in Europe. In the separate analysis of Arts and Humanities faculties, Leiden fares considerably better with a ranking of 35^th in the World (4^th in Europe).

Times Higher Educational Supplement (THES) Rankings
Times Higher Educational Supplement (THES) Arts & Humanities rankings

QS Rankings

In 2011 the QS rankings placed Leiden 88 in the World (30th in Europe) with a score of 66.57. The best performing indicator for Leiden, was the citations index. In terms of citations per faculty, Leiden emerged with a ranking of 16, 3^rd in Europe.
The Humanities Faculty fared better in the rankings with a place of 37 (14^th in Europe) and the History Institute fared even better with a place of 34 (8^th in Europe) and, of course, the BA International Studies is based there.

QS rankings 2011
QS rankings Arts & Humanities

Shanghai Jiao Tong University Rankings

The Shanghai Jiao Tong University Rankings are also well established. In 2011 it placed Leiden University at 65 in the World rankings and 14^th in Europe. This is a gratifying but a little surprising given the bias in favour of natural sciences in its weightings. It likes Nobel prizes and Fields medals to alumni and current staff and gives it a combined weighting of 30%. That imparts a heavy bias to physics, chemistry, medicine and mathematics. Luckily Leiden managed a few many years back before big, concentrated spending put most of these out of range. This bias is reinforced by a full 20% allocated to publication in the journals Science and Nature and another 20% to the Science citation index (the Social Science Index taking another 20%). Whilst we stayed in the game with the prizes, it is in the publications that Leiden again held its own, especially when academic output was related to the number of academic staff, where we came 22^nd (7^th in Europe, and this time Oxford and Cambridge did beat us)– unfortunately, that indicator only counted for 10% of the weighting.